We are pleased to announce release 1.3.0 of the Classified Ads component for Joomla named Rialto.

This component runs on Joomla 3.5.1 (and above).

This release adds the ability for registered users to subscribe to receive messages about new and/or entries. It also corrects a few problems found with the earlier 1.2.2 release. It also changes the front end entry creation to use JForms and provides some additional language options for messages..

The Joomla component came from a requirement to display IP addresses of site visitors upon Google maps.

This release fixes a few newly discovered problems.

The most important is probably that the site googlecode.com is no more, the code now residing upon Github. One consequence of this is that the it is no longer possible to link to the makercluster javascript file and we have to now include it in the distribution. The file has also had to be modified so that it no longer directs to googlecode for images.

One other change is that the policy usage of Google Maps seems to require an API key, which has caused problems on some sites, but strangely not upon others. See more below.

We have therefore introduced two additional API keys that can be specified.

There was formally one API key which is used by the connection to the IP InfoDB server to get the location details of the IP address. This InfoDB key is used by the visitor agent map IF the HTML5 Geolocations is turned on. It is also used in the back end of the site.

The two new possible API keys relate to Google Maps API. One is a browser API key and the second is a server API key. Some sites seem to require the setting of a Google Maps API key, where as others seem not to require one. We do not know why this is the situation.

According to the Google Maps API docs a browser key or a server key will work, otherwise a NOAPIKEYS message is displayed in the browser console window. Our tests seem to indicate that a browser API key will only work IF there are no defined HTTP referrers defined. When there is one or more HTTP referrers defined, then the maps fail to load.

Our tests using a Server API key appear to work every time. We should also add that some sites, among which we include our own, do not require an API key, and still work fine displaying the maps. Whether this continues to be the case in the future remains to be seen. It might be wise to obtain a server API key as a possible safe guard for a future Google Maps API change.

The Joomla component came from a requirement to display IP addresses of site visitors upon Google maps.

This minor update adds a new option to permit its usage where the web server is located behind a CDN such as Cloudflare. It offers an alternative to loading the Cloudflare plugin, but is also expected to work with other CDN sites where such a plugin is not available. It has not been possible to test against all possible CDN systems but there are not expected to be any problems.

Other minor changes include some coding cleanups and a change to use of the window.load function in the mapper module.

We are pleased to announce the release 1.0.3 of our Timesheet component for Joomla 3.5.

Macrotone Timesheet is a component which allows employees to enter timesheet information that may later be printed and/or distributed to the company accounts for processing. The idea is that employees have a central mechanism for time entries against specific project (or account) codes.

Note that it requires a MySQL database version 5.5.3 or higher.

This minor update corrects a few minor problems, updates the underlying grid software to the latest release version and adds a few more options to the front end time code display.

This minor update corrects and removes the deprecated feature message seen when PHP 7 is used upon a site.

The plugin has been used on our site since the introduction of the legal requirement to comply with the EU Cookie Directive for web sites. This plugin complies with the regulation by notifying the user of the Cookie policy.

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